The Latest

Not long ago, I returned from a wonderful trip to Seville, the location of this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting. This event brings together many users and developers of open source graphics software, and gives a chance for a lot of cross pollination among different projects. Sometimes very dramatic things happen, like the release of the long, looong awaited Gimp 2.10!

I’m happy to say node based interfaces had a strong presence this year. For instance, Neil Smith demonstrated Praxis Live, including live music through a mix of code and nodes. Antonio Roberts performed “live noding” with Pure Data, manipulating 3-d structures together with music in real time. I demoed my own brand new node interface in Laidout, which I hope to adapt to various uses in open source software. I had several interesting conversions with Gimp, Inkscape, and other devs about uses for nodes and possible ways forward with interfaces for them. What is life without a huge to-do list?

Speaking of to-do lists, thanks to everyone who came to my node workshop at LGM. Thanks to that, we found several bugs, and a few new node requests, which are now all fixed and implemented!

There were also a number of other artists and projects using a live environment, such as Rodrigo Velasco’s live coding sound and image. Also Antropoloops, which allows a kind of world music mixing, seamlessly mixing samples from around the world, showing a live map of where the sample is from, and which can even be performed by kids from those regions literally connecting themselves to capacitive pads, and to other people!

You can see some of my travel photos here, with more to come, as soon as I have time to process them! In the meantime, here’s a drawing of many of the people at the meeting. You should come to this next year in Saarbrücken, Germany!

Assuming my travel arrangements all work out, I’ll be at this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting in Seville, Spain, April 26-30. I’ll be giving a workshop called “In The Nodes”, about node based interfaces in open source software, for instance in Blender, Godot game engine, and my own Laidout. So if you are in the neighborhood, come on down, there is sure to be a lot of interesting activity about all things open source graphics software!

If you are in Pasadena on Friday, March 9 at 10 am, you should skip work or whatever and come see me talk about Laidout at the 16th annual Southern California Linux Fest, Scale 16x! I’ll be demoing the ins and outs of Laidout, including the new node tool, which you can see a video snapshot of here: